That man Tom Hobson who used to be on the Morning Show has his own website now. He’s joined up with UrbanDox and BabeTruth and some of the others. Jos reads it on her cellphone when no one else is around. There are accounts on Tom Hobson’s website of things happening in Bessapara that Jos can’t really believe. Torture and experiments, gangs of women on the loose in the north near the border, murdering and raping men at will. Here in the south it’s quiet, even with the growing border unrest. Jocelyn’s met people in this country – they’re mostly really nice. She’s met men who agree that the laws are sensible for right now, while they’re at war. And women who’ve invited her in for tea in their houses.
But there are things she finds easy to believe, too. Tom writes about how in Bessapara, where she is right now, there are people doing experiments on boys like Ryan. Cutting them to pieces to find out what’s happened to them. Feeding them big glops of that street drug called Glitter. They say the drug’s being shipped out of Bessapara, pretty near to where she is. Tom’s got Google maps of the location on the site. Tom says the real reason the US army is stationed where she is, in the south of Bessapara, is because they’re protecting the supplies of Glitter. Keep everything orderly, so Margot Cleary can arrange her shipments of Glitter from organized-crime syndicates to NorthStar, who sell it back to the US army at a marked-up price.
For more than a year, the army had been giving her a small regulation packet of a purple-white powder every three days, ‘for her condition’. One of the sites Ryan showed her said that the powder makes girls with skein abnormalities worse. It increases the highs and the lows. Your system becomes dependent on it.
But now she’s OK. She’d say it was like a miracle, but it’s not like anything. It was an actual miracle. She was there for it. She prays every night in the dark in her bunk, closing her eyes and whispering, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ She’s been healed. She’s OK. She thinks to herself, If I was saved, there must be a reason.
Jos goes to look at the unused packets stashed under her mattress. And at the photos on Tom Hobson’s site of the drugs he’s talking about.
She texts Ryan. Secret phone, burner, he changes it every three weeks.
Ryan says, ‘Do you really believe your mom’s made a deal with a drug cartel?’
Jos says, ‘I don’t believe that, if she had the opportunity, she wouldn’t.’
It’s Jocelyn’s day off. She signs a jeep out from the base – she’s just going for a country drive, meeting up with some friends, that OK? She’s the daughter of a Senator tipped to run for the big house at the next election and a major stakeholder in NorthStar. Of course it’s OK.
She consults the print-outs of the maps from Tom Hobson’s website. If he’s right, one of the drug manufacturing centres in Bessapara is only about forty miles away. And there was that weird thing that happened a few weeks earlier: some of the girls from the base chased an unmarked van through the forest. The driver shot at them. They lost it in the end, and reported it as possible North Moldovan terrorist activity. But Jos knows what direction it was heading in.
There’s a lightness in her as she gets into the jeep. She’s got a half-day furlough. The sun is shining. She’ll drive down to where the place should be and see if she can see anything. She’s feeling light-hearted. Her skein is humming strong and true as it always does now, and she feels good. Normal. It’s an adventure. Worst comes to worst, she’ll have had a nice drive. But she might be able to take some photos to put online herself. But it might come out much better than that; she might find something that would incriminate her mother. Something she could email Margot and say: If you don’t back the fuck off and let me go and live my life, these are going straight to the Washington Post. Getting photographs like that … that wouldn’t be a bad day at all.
Tunde
It wasn’t hard at first. He’d made friends enough to shelter him as he travelled first out through the city and satellite towns and then towards the mountains. He knows Bessapara and North Moldova; he’d travelled here, researching the story about Awadi-Atif a lifetime ago. He feels curiously safe here.
And a regime cannot, in general, turn overnight from one thing to another. Bureaucracies are slow. People take their time. The old man must be kept on to show the new women how the paper mill is soused down, or how the stocktaking check on the flour order is made. All over the country, there are men still running their factories while the women mutter among themselves about the new laws and wonder when something will happen to enforce them. In his first weeks on the road, Tunde took photographs of the new ordinances, of the fights in the street, of the dead-eyed men imprisoned in their homes. His plan was to travel for a few weeks, and simply record what he saw. It would be the last chapter of the book that’s waiting for him backed up on USB sticks and in filled notebooks in Nina’s apartment in New York.
He heard rumours that the most extreme events had been in the mountains. No one would say what they’d heard, not precisely. They talked grimly of backward country folk and of the darkness that had never quite receded there, not under any of a dozen different regimes and dictators.
Peter, the waiter from Tatiana Moskalev’s party, had said, ‘They used to blind the girls. When the power first came, the men there, the warlords, blinded all the girls. That is what I heard. They put their eyes out with hot irons. So they could still be the bosses, you see?’
‘And now?’
Peter shook his head. ‘Now we don’t go there.’
So Tunde had decided, for want of another goal, to walk towards the mountains.
In the eighth week it began to be bad. He arrived in a town by the edge of a great green-blue lake. He walked, hungry, through the streets on a Sunday morning until he came to a bakery with open doors, a fug of steam and yeast leaking deliciously into the street.
He proffered some coins to the man behind the counter and pointed at some puffy white rolls cooling on a wire rack. The man made the accustomed ‘hands open like a book’ gesture to ask to see Tunde’s papers; this had been happening more frequently. Tunde showed his passport and his news-gathering credentials.
The man leafed through the passport, looking, Tunde knew, for the official stamp declaring his guardian, who would then have co-signed a pass for him to be out shopping today. He went through each page carefully. Having conscientiously examined it, he made the ‘papers’ sign again, a little panic rising in his face. Tunde smiled and shrugged and tipped his head to one side.
‘Come on,’ he said, though there was no indication the man spoke any English. ‘It’s just some little rolls. These are all the papers I have, man.’
Until now, this had been enough. Usually someone would smile at this point at the absurd foreign journalist or give a little lecture in broken English about how he must be properly certified next time, and Tunde would apologize and give his charming grin, and he would walk out of the store with his meal or supplies.
This time the man behind the counter shook his head miserably again. He pointed towards a sign on the wall in Russian. Tunde translated it with the help of his phrasebook. It was, roughly: ‘Five thousand dollar fine for anyone found to have helped a man without papers.’
Tunde shrugged and smiled and opened his palms to show them empty. He made a ‘looking-around’ gesture, cocking his hand over his eyes and miming a scouting of the horizon.